Garmin has released a map update, their 2010 update. Yes, it's April 2009, but that's what it's called.
So how new is the data? Well, the previous update didn't include any of the Costco stores in Ottawa. This new update includes one - only one - of the three Costco stores in Ottawa.
And it doesn't include the street I live on, which was built over 3 years ago.
So the 2010 update seems to be current, for Ottawa, anyway, as of about 2004.
I've been managing a fairly large music library (~80 gig) with iTunes for a while now, and I've come up with some techniques for managing the music library that I think work pretty well. I'm going to write a series of blog posts with techniques for managing your iTunes library, including trying to surface some of the music that lurks in the your music library but you probably haven't listened to in ages.
Everyone has their own way of managing their music library. If you've spend some time thinking about this and working on your own organization system then your natural reaction will be to think mine is wrong but bear with me. I'm not saying this is the best way, it works for me.
First step: Cleanup
So you've got music that you ripped from CD's. As this music was being ripped, the titles for the tracks were probably retrieved from CDDB (now GraceNote), which uses titles and other data based on whatever title was typed in by the first user who ripped the cd.
Whoever entered these titles probably wasn't thinking about normalization and consistency with what other people were entering, so they typed in what they thought was right. And nobody can agree on what's right, so there's not much consistency.
This can make a mess of your library.
or
Even buying all your music from iTunes is no guarantee that the fields will be what you want them to be. (They may be arguably correct, but what's more important is that they make sense to you).
These are multiple entries for what you probably think of as one group.
The best way to clean this up is to select all the files, and then Get Info. iTunes will ask if you're sure you want to edit them all:
And then bring up UI that will let you edit the properties for all the selected tracks at once:
When you hit OK, only the checked fields will be updated in your music files. So type in a new value for Artist ("Timbaland" perhaps) and click OK.
Walk down your list of artists and coalesce them where it makes sense. This will make building smart playlists later on easier.
Another field you'll want to do this for is genres. This one is important.
Unless you've been on top of this, your genres list is probably a mess. In the iTunes UI, click on Music in the list at the left, go to the List view (on the View menu), and look at the Genre list.
If you've got entries in here like "Rock", "Rock and Roll" and "Rock & Roll", merge those as well.
Think about how you're going to want to use your music when you're assigning it to genres. Christmas music is a good example.
Some Christmas music is clearly Jazz, or perhaps Classical or Country or Rock & Roll, but what's more relevant is that it's Christmas music. iTunes only lets you assign one genre to a song, so assign a genre that you can use to help decide whether you want to play the song or not. For me, this means all Christmas music has the genre Christmas.
And while no band wants to be pigeonholed into a mainstream genre, how often are you going to go looking for "Rock, with a bit of Pink Floyd influence" as a genre of music to listen to? I started out with my music in literally hundreds of genres and reduced it to 36.
I'll end this post here; getting your collection in order should keep you busy while I'm preparing the next one.
The discussion forums that Adobe runs for our products, at http://forums.adobe.com, have just been upgraded. I don't know what technology they were based on but it was pretty dusty. The new stuff looks good.
Drop by the new LiveCycle Designer ES forum if you have any Designer questions. It's your typical "not official support" community support forums that many companies operate, but at least in the case of Designer, a few of the folks on the development team do frequent the forum, as well as some other Adobe folks who know a lot about building and deploying forms through LiveCycle.
I added ads to some of the posts on the Ottawa Events site RSS feed. It looks like there are almost 300 subscribers to that feed, and it'll be interesting to see if I lose any to the ads. They're fairly small and unobtrusive (and because the content is so focused, seem more relevant than the ads on the site) but I'm sure there are folks who object to the idea of any ads in RSS feeds.
But at least the site feed is still the full content, so I'm not forcing users to visit the site to see the content, like many feeds do. And those feeds I typically unsubscribe from.
I'm very impressed with how well the site is doing. Just this weekend there are 14 events listed, and I didn't enter any of them - people around Ottawa have been adding events they find interesting, and occasionally commenting with updates when details on the events change. I'd like to add a way for folks to vote up events they like, so that I can trim down the main page - right now it actually suffers from having too many events.
I also removed the big image ad from the event details page, replacing it with a smaller banner ad. I really don't want the site to become overrun with ads, so I hope people see this as a reasonable tradeoff. Let me know what you think.
Two incidents caught my eye today:
This one, where all the equipment in a datacenter belong to Core IP Networks LLC was seized, allegedly to help police determine the source of a movie leak.
And this one, where the RCMP shut down a record shop in Ottawa, for allegedly selling bootleg records (although police only found 5 rare bootlegs out of over 200,000 items for sale - and there's a big difference between sourcing a rare bootleg of a concert and mass producing and selling copyrighted material).
At least in the 2nd case, the police were polite.
Cool:
http://live.sysinternals.com
A direct link to a runnable version of the latest SysInternals tools.
If you're wondering how to pass parameters into a Flex popup window, as documented here or here, or how to set the initObj parameter.. it's deprecated.
I was trying to figure out how to create a popup window and pass a parameter into it, and really I still don't think I have, but the new official way to do this is to set properties of the popup window class after it's been created. So for example:
var popup:MyPopup = PopUpManager.createPopUp( popupParent, MyPopup, true ) as MyPopup;
popup.someVariable = someValue;
I don't see documented whether the popup's initialize may have already run by the time you get to properties on it.
Also, the documentation (and various Google searches) implies that the way to center a popup is to create it and then call centerPopUp but that centers it once - it won't stay centered as the window changes size. If you want it to stay centered as the browser or AIR app is resized, then bind the position of the popup to the application's size:
<mx:Panel xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute"
x="{(Application.application.width/2) - (this.width/2)}"
y="{(Application.application.height/2) - (this.height/2)}">
This keeps the popup centered.
Calculated Risk has a post on Q1 GDP, predicting it will be ugly. He uses an analogy to demonstrate how companies that make enabling technologies like computers and software will be in for tough times.
Imagine ACME widget company with a steadily growing sales volume (say 5% per year). In the first half of 2008 their sales were running at 100 widgets per year, but in the 2nd half sales fell to a 95 widget per year rate. Not too bad.
ACME's customers are telling the company that they expect to only buy 95 widgets this year, and 95 in 2010. Not good news, but still not too bad for ACME.
But this is a disaster for companies that manufacturer widget making equipment. ACME was steadily buying new widget making equipment over the years, but now they have all the equipment they need for the next two years or longer.
This could explain why Dell is being hit harder (48% profit drop last quarter) than the level of drop in the economy would suggest. Dell's sales depend on growth in other companies, and in companies upgrading equipment. In tough times, current employees can make that old computer last longer, and no hiring means no new computers, meaning no sales for Dell.
But there is one way that I think computer equipment is different from the widget machine in the example. In manufacturing, equipment is more expensive and represents more of a capital investment (and retains more value) than do computers. Have you ever heard of a company buying used computer equipment for new employees? I haven't.
And, even when those computers are sold, the software licenses generally don't come along for the ride. If a company owns a computer worth $2000 and has $2000 worth of licensed software on it (typically Windows, Office, Adobe CS4, plus more), when a company goes into bankruptcy or sells off computers they don't need, they typically (at least in my experience) wipe the machines, and don't pay that much attention to the software licenses.
On the other side, when new companies are started, they buy all new computers and all new software.
In a recession, a lot of small companies are started, and as we come out of the recession, those companies will grow, and so will the existing companies that have suspended purchasing.
If a company typically buys new computers every 2 years, but has suspended that to 3 years during the recession, it's likely that when the recession ends and they're doing well again, they'll go back to 2 years. That next year you'll see 2 years worth of sales (maybe at a lower rate because the company is now smaller, but still) in 1 year.
My expectation is that when the economy shows signs of recovering, tech companies will recover faster than the rest of the economy (although the accelerated recovery will be a bit of a bubble - hopefully companies don't think that year of pent up sales is the new run rate and scale up to that!)
Flash has been doing video on the web for years now, and doing an awesome job at it. The Flash Player has a number of built-in codecs, and all the Flash video on the web plays in the latest Flash player, no hassles. And HD videos look great.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has their various video container formats (ASF, WMV, AVI) where the codec that you need to play the content is dependent on the streams in the containers. In other words, given a *.avi file, you have no idea what you need to have installed to play it.
This leads to the various codec packs you can download, which almost invariably are a vehicle for malware. It's a terrible situation, and I think one of the reasons Flash video has done so well.
Microsoft apparently doesn't get this, because the latest version of Silverlight has "Extensible Media Format Support", which means developers can plug in arbitrary video or audio codecs to support other video formats.
Argh.
So one site will be posting Ogg-contained videos and another DivX videos, and I'm going to need to download a bunch of codecs to view videos with Silverlight? No thanks.
I keep seeing stories about this:
Suleman -- already a single mother with six young children -- gave birth to the octuplets through in-vitro fertilization, fueling controversy. News of her collecting public assistance for some of her children also outraged many taxpayers.
It seems like there's always some nonsense story in the media that people pay more attention to than what's really going on.
Meanwhile, the US government has given AIG 170 billion dollars.
Here's a little perspective: Social assistance payments in California can be up to $793 per child. Assuming she gets the max, for each child, that's $11102 per month.
What's been given to AIG would pay her children's support costs for 1.28 million years.